The finger trick is excellent I wasn't able to boot with debian or wheezy from different sandisk classe 10 16GB extreme card.

For anyone that wants to try it out, boot the RPI off wheezy and let it get stuck where the PWR and OK LED are both solidly on. Turn the PI over and place your finger over the left one-third of the pins. Move your finger until the LEDs change state. Not really a science nor an art.

For the accuracy and fairness, I just want to share that I am amongst the lucky people that got this problem solved by changing the SD card.

It seems that a fair amount of the "Red LED on Faint Green LED" problems relates to either a too weak power source or a bad SD card.So if you experience this problem, try changing those two things before you despair!

It's a cool device! I love it already! Be sure to test one of the XBMC distros! They give a great impression of the power concealed in the tiny little thing!

After placing the order mid March and waiting patiently until it arrived last week, I am starting to doubt if this is going to work. I tried the new bootcode with all the distros and multiple power supplies that I know are good (5V +/- 1% and >1A) and shelling out $50 on new SD cards of various types from the known good list. I have just raised an RMA with element14. Let's hope I can get a new board soon, and that it works. Very dissappointed enthusiast...

I tried the new bootcode with all the distros and multiple power supplies that I know are good (5V +/- 1% and >1A) and shelling out $50 on new SD cards of various types from the known good list. I have just raised an RMA with element14.

- 4x SD cards and 2x microSD - 2 were from the compatible card list.- With the raspbmc installer and wheezy, squeeze and Arch images with and without the new bootcode.bin in all. (Used win32imager)- With 3 power supplies 2x 1A and 1x 2.1A.

With all the combinations above I had no luck whatsoever getting it to boot. Then after reading the posts here I tried another laptops inbuilt SD card reader and as if by magic and being an engineer I can only assume it is magic the image booted. In fact all the images put on to all but one of the SD cards and with all the power supplies just work fine if I use the SD card reader in the second laptop but reimage one of them in mine and back to no booting.

So one things I would say. Don't RMA until you have tried a couple of different SD card readers.

Now back to that magic thing. I really feel the need to understand this. My SD reader has been used to transfer GB's of photos from SD cards and to copy data to and from Android devices and not once has there been any noticeable corruptions so I cant see it being that. I am left with 2 thoughts on the matter . one both the raspbmc installer and win32imager do not control my specific SD reader correctly and the data is indeed wrong on the card. I will investigate this later by trying dd in linux on my laptop and I will also read back the image programmed using win32imager on mine on the other laptop and diff against gold.

Two the other thought I had and I was hoping others with more SD card knowledge than I would weigh in. I have used SD cards in SPI mode and only seen the free limited spec. Is it possible that the SD card programmers are leaving some configuration registers in the SD card in a mode/with settings that the Pi does not change and are not compatible with it.

I just think it would be good to nail this down as a list of compatible SD cards clearly isn't enough and it seems to cause unnecessary RMA's and stress at the Pi for seeming like an Alpha release. I say that as if I had used the other laptop bring up would have been 12 minutes not 2 days and its not really the Pi hardware fault (directly). FYI the Pi has been happily working all day now I have an image it will boot.

FalseIdle wrote:Now back to that magic thing. I really feel the need to understand this. My SD reader has been used to transfer GB's of photos from SD cards and to copy data to and from Android devices and not once has there been any noticeable corruptions so I cant see it being that. I am left with 2 thoughts on the matter . one both the raspbmc installer and win32imager do not control my specific SD reader correctly and the data is indeed wrong on the card. I will investigate this later by trying dd in linux on my laptop and I will also read back the image programmed using win32imager on mine on the other laptop and diff against gold.

Can you:use win32imager on the bad sdcard reader to write the card. Then use it on the good sdcard reader to read the image off the sdcard.use win32imager on the good sdcard reader to write the card. Then use it on the good sdcard reader to read the image off the sdcard.

You now have two images that should be the same (and the same as the downloaded image). Compare them. I'm guess the one written with bad sdcard reader will look different.Be interesting to see if it has occasional incorrect bytes, or it is truncated, or there's nothing recognisable there at all.

dom wrote:Can you:use win32imager on the bad sdcard reader to write the card. Then use it on the good sdcard reader to read the image off the sdcard.use win32imager on the good sdcard reader to write the card. Then use it on the good sdcard reader to read the image off the sdcard.

You now have two images that should be the same (and the same as the downloaded image). Compare them. I'm guess the one written with bad sdcard reader will look different.Be interesting to see if it has occasional incorrect bytes, or it is truncated, or there's nothing recognisable there at all.

Wife using the laptop that has the good SD reader (Had to be the wife's that worked and not mine) but when its free I shall do as you asked and report back.

Semy wrote:I've got a solid red LED and a green LED that, on start up, will occasionally flicker intermittently but stop after a few seconds. Depending on which distro I have used there will sometimes be a pinprick of light in the green LED.

psypher246 wrote:Just tried writing the debian image with DD and then downloaded the new bootcode.bin and replaced it on the SD card but still not booting.

I'd start with Wheezy image and update bootcode.bin and start.elf.

Otherwise, trying a different sdcard could work.

So far I have tested:

3 different known working, supported (as per wiki) sd cards.2 different PC's to write the image from.2 different OS's (Windows on HP, Ubuntu on Dell)2 different imagesOn all of these I have tried the suggested bootcode.bin and start.elfmy power is also correctI have tried all the suggestions on the wikiIt is winter where I am so quite coldStill all I get is red light with feint green. no blinking at all, ever

What else could I try? Surely at this point it's not my method or the memory thats at fault?

Stefan_C wrote:After placing the order mid March and waiting patiently until it arrived last week, I am starting to doubt if this is going to work. I tried the new bootcode with all the distros and multiple power supplies that I know are good (5V +/- 1% and >1A) and shelling out $50 on new SD cards of various types from the known good list. I have just raised an RMA with element14. Let's hope I can get a new board soon, and that it works. Very dissappointed enthusiast...

Sorry I forgot to mention my symptoms:

I am testing without any peripherals plugged in to any ports on the Pi, I wanted to see if the Green LED would blink at all - like it does on many youtube videos others have posted of working Pi's.

RED PWR LED is always ON bright. GREEN OK LED is always on very dim. Nothing flickers ever. Nothing gets very hot, no smoke, only a slight smell. I tried 2 mains power supplies, which both work for other devices, 5V +/- 1% and >1A, tested with a meter before and after plugging in to the Pi at TP1-TP2. Tested voltage at GPIO P1-01 (3V3) shows exactly 3.3V. Also tested voltage across RG2 (5V->3.3V) & RG1 (3.3V->1.8V) - seems fine.

SD Cards (all these cards work fine on all other devices I have (2 cameras, 2 PCs running windows and ubuntu (both with USB SD card readers), and an android tablet (buit-in card reader):1. Sandisk 2GB SD Class 2 (old)2. Sandisk 8GB SDHC Class 4 (new)3. Sony 4GB SDHC Class 4 (SF-4N4) (new) - the packaging said SF-4N4 but now that I look closer at the card it is SF-4C4! So this one's not on the known good or bad list.

4. Kingston 8GB Class 10 (new) - I will try this one today - and I will use a 3rd computer and card reader I haven't used before.

As I mentioned before I tried 3 distros available from raspberrypi.org (debian squeeze, debian wheezy beta, arch linux) - with and without the bootcode.bin and start.elf copied from github. I created the SD cards using Windows 7 (64bit) running Win32DiskImager, and Win XP (32 bit) running Win32DiskImager, and also Ubuntu 12.04 (64bit) running dd. Which ever way I write the SD cards I can always see both vFAT and ext4 partitions. I ran the sha1 hashs on bootcode.ini and start.elf to ensure they match those downloaded from github.

I'm wondering if anyone who has it working can share the hashes off their boot partition for all files? So I can test if my boot partition is written correctly? Let us know which distro it is.

jhasler wrote:Do cards written with that card reader work well in other devices?

Sorry for my english.The first card reader is a several years old (noname) and im using it to transfer photos, videos and music (cameras and phones) without problem but the Pi images just dont work.The second is a new Kingston and with this images working.

Today i tried to read one of the SD cards created at home on my office PC (Win7 64bit) and it says it needs to format the card. However when I checked on disk management it shows a single RAW partition of 95MB on the card. I cannot access the BOOT partition. Whereas at home I can browse both partitions within Ubuntu without any issues.

Looking at the recent feedback on this thread I believe it could be the SD card readers I have at home. But are there any known good SD card reader models I can try? I can go to the shop and get another SD card reader easily enough but how will I know that I am not just buying another one with the same problem?

I tried creating another SD card using dd and the debian squeeze image. Then I tried immediately reading the card using DD to create an image file on the PC, then ran SHA1SUM against this file and the hash is different from the original image used to create the SD card. Does this mean anything?